EMULATE DIMEBAG DARRELL’S BLISTERING RIFF-WRITING STYLE AND LEAD-PLAYING TECHNIQUES WITH THIS SIX PACK OF DIME-INSPIRED RIFFS AND LICKS
BY CHARLIE GRIFFITHS
THE LATE, GREAT Dimebag Darrell Abbott continues to be one of both Texas’ and modern metal’s most celebrated and influential guitarists. His bone-crunching power-chord and single-note riffs, hauntingly beautiful clean, mellow arpeggio passages and wailing, goosebump-inducing leads, as featured in such Pantera classics as “Cowboys from Hell,” “Floods,” “This Love,” “Cemetery Gates,” “Primal Concrete Sledge,” “5 Minutes Alone” and others, continue to inspire metal and hard rock guitarists the world over. In this lesson, we present a handful of short, Dime-influenced phrases that offer insight into the legendary guitarist’s unique, innovative style.
Dimebag’s lead playing was characterized by slick, wide-stretch legato passages, fast alternate picking and his trademark screaming natural and artificial “pinch” harmonics and gut-wrenching whammy bar manipulations, often underpinned with an aggressive Texas blues flavor. Mastering Dime’s lead style will take time and practice, so play these musical examples slowly at first, and focus on accuracy and clean note production above speed.
FIGURE 1: POWER CHORD RIFFING
A signature element of Dimebag’s super-tight rhythm playing style was his use of quickly shifting power chords and syncopated rhythms, with chord changes occurring in unexpected and interesting ways, relative to the beat. This first example has you shifting root-5th-octave power chords up chromatically, with an emphasis on the eighth-note upbeat of beat 2, where the pattern skips back to the first chord (E5) before continuing on up to G#5 in 4th position by the end of the bar. Strive to keep a steady eighth-note rhythm as the phrasing “hiccups” and restarts on an upbeat.
FIGURE 2: PICKING, LEGATO & WIDE STRETCHES
This sinewy lick is performed entirely on the high E string and requires an insanely wide fret-hand stretch to reach all the notes while performing combinations of pull-offs and hammer-ons. Allow your fret hand to rotate radically, to reach the lowest and highest notes.
An alternative, much less demanding performance option would be to tap the highest note (B, 19th fret) with your pick hand and pick only the first note. This would enable you to use a more compact, comfortable fret-hand fingering.
FIGURE 3: BLUES-SCALE & POWER GROOVES
Bars 1 and 2 of this example demonstrate Dime-style
